'Can the leopard change his spots?' the prophet asked ( Jeremiah, 13:23), clearly not expecting to be told he can. Nor, indeed, can
mice, except under the rather discreditable circumstances now to
be outlined.

It is a well-attested truth of observation that except under
special and unusual circumstances skin from one mouse or human being will not form a permanent graft after transplantation
to another mouse or another human being; for although such a
graft heals into place it soon becomes inflamed and ulcerated, and
eventually dries up and sloughs off. The exceptional circumstances are: in human beings, when donor and recipient are
identical twins, and in mice when prolonged inbreeding (e.g.,
upward of twenty successive generations of brother/sister mating)
has made the mice so closely similar to each other genetically that
they almost could be identical twins.

This being so, great surprise was caused in the world of transplantation when Dr William Summerlin, a member of the largest
and in many ways the most important cancer research centre in
the world, the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York, with the
backing of his chief, Dr Robert A. Good, made known in 1973 his
surprising claim that a comparatively simple procedure -- 'tissueculture' -- could make a skin graft or a corneal graft from a member of the same or even of a different species acceptable to an
organism that would otherwise have rejected it. This claim was
specially important because grafting skin from one human being
to another has never entered clinical practice, in spite of encour-

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